James Dooley sits down with David G Quaid to unpack AEO, SEO and GEO, exploring how much these disciplines really overlap and how marketers should position themselves in an increasingly bifurcated search market. They discuss GEO budgets, co-ranking, Reddit and Quora, keyword strategy, LLM visibility, data measurement and why understanding buyer intent matters more than arguing over industry terminology.

Google Trends has added two new features this morning, explore maps and regional breakdown.

Google said it "designed new interactive maps for clearer data storytelling." You can now "instantly spot regional trends, capture visual insights for your audience, and explore the 'where' behind every search with our new, intuitive maps," Google added on

Ready to spot local trends? Try the new Google Trends Explore maps and regional breakdown today!

We designed new interactive maps for clearer data storytelling. 🗺️ Instantly spot regional trends, capture visual insights for your audience, and explore the 'where' behind every search with our new, intuitive maps.

This experience is being rolled out gradually.
Try it out at → trends.google.com/explore!

Google seems to be testing a revamped and updated Q&A feature for Google Business Profiles (GBP). There is an additional Q&A button in the GBP dashboard in Google Search, and a flow that prompts you with yes-or-no questions tailored to your business.

This was spotted by Syed Amir who posted some screenshots on X - he also wrote, "I noticed, Google is rolling out a revamped Q&A experience in GBP."

Thanks to u/rustybrick

That’s the question at the center of today’s episode with David G. Quaid.

A listener sent me a problem he and his friends keep running into: they launch programmatic SEO sites with 10,000 - 100,000 URLs, organic traffic shoots up, and then the sites collapse back to zero.

So David and I dug into whether large-scale programmatic SEO is still possible in 2026, where Google may draw the line between a legitimate database and scaled content abuse, and what separates sites that survive from sites that get wiped out.

We cover:

• Whether launching 10,000 or 100,000 URLs at once is automatically dangerous
• Why David might launch a new marketplace or database slowly
• The difference between legitimate programmatic SEO and scaled content built primarily to capture search traffic
• Why empty location, category, job, or marketplace pages can become doorway-page problems
• Why proprietary data can completely change the equation
• Whether a site with genuinely useful data could launch at massive scale from day one
• Why backlinks, press coverage, branded searches, and other signs of a real business may matter
• Why user satisfaction could be one of the biggest differences between programmatic sites that survive and sites that collapse
• Click-through rate, pogo-sticking, return searches, and other user signals we think Google may be evaluating
• Why publishing 100 pages, checking performance, and then scaling may be safer than immediately publishing 100,000
• How to use Google Search Console to identify pages and queries that may be producing poor user signals
• Why misleading page titles can create problems even when they initially generate more traffic
• David’s prediction for what Google’s August spam update could target
• Why some publishers may be blaming AI Overviews for traffic losses that are actually ranking losses
• How to separate traffic lost to AI Overviews from traffic lost because Google moved your pages down
• Why HubSpot’s organic decline may have more to do with rankings and changing user behavior than AI simply taking its clicks
• Whether Google Search has actually gotten better or worse over the last few years
• How far a site can expand into adjacent topics before weakening its existing topical relevance

Hat/tip to u/rustybrick for ringing the alarm bells!

Google has just announced the release of the August 2026 spam update and said it should only take a few days to roll out. This is a global update and is expected to impact all languages. This only impacts sites that spam, but with any update, there may be collateral damage.

Google wrote:

>Released the August 2026 spam update, which applies globally and to all languages. The rollout may take a few days to complete.

Google added on LinkedIn

>Today we released the August 2026 spam update to Google Search.

The New York-headquartered global Employer of Record renews its SOC 2 Type II attestation for a full 12-month period, adding to its ISO 27001 and GDPR certifications and its recent A+ platform security rating from Astra Security.

NEW YORK, Aug. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- RemotePeople, a global provider of Employer of Record (EOR), payroll, and recruitment services operating in more than 150 countries, today announced the successful completion of its 2026 SOC 2 Type II audit, covering the Security, Availability, and Confidentiality Trust Service Criteria. The independent examination was performed by INTERCERT CPA LLC in accordance with AICPA SSAE 21 attestation standards and covered a continuous 12-month observation period from May 31, 2025 to May 30, 2026.

More from u/rustybrick on SE Roundtable:

>Google is testing blue hyperlinks in the ad descriptions within the sponsored results. These are clickable, keyword rich, links in the ads, similar to what we saw last week with the keyword rich anchor text links but those were black links, not blue.

>Here is a screenshot of this from Sachin Patel who posted some examples on X:

Thanks to SEO reporter u/rustybrick :

>
Apple has added over 4,000 new IP addresses for Applebot, Apple's Siri and Apple Intelligence crawler, to crawl from. Specifically, there are now 18 of /24 CIDR ranges and 3 of /28, which totals 4,656 new IP addresses.

>I spotted this via Ryan Siddle who posted this on LinkedIn, he wrote, "It looks like Apple might be entering the AI race with a new flavour of Applebot/Siri." "We've seen on several occasions OpenAI ramp up their IPs to warm the servers. The most recent was the Sol 5.6 release, but it wasn't at the scale Apple just did. Apple also hadn't updated their IPs for many years," he added.

And after the brands were told no or the content removed, they stopped posting.

Why?

Because they weren't here to engage. They wanted free engagement from the worlds best SEO community/resource.

Google is now promoting YouTube creator partnerships on branded search outcomes, as well as on views, engagement, and subscribers, but the playbook making that pitch never explains how a brand without an internal data science team is supposed to measure it.

Buried inside “Creator Marketing: Build Edition,” the case studies are doing something more specific than proving creator content works. They’re proving it moves the same metric SEOs have spent two decades optimizing for directly: branded search demand.

Three of the four headline case studies lead with the reach and engagement metrics YouTube has sold against for more than 15 years. Adobe’s page leads with Kinigra Deon’s 5.9 million subscribers, a scale metric, not a lift metric. The L’Oréal case study leads with an 82% surge in overall views per mention, an engagement number. Coach’s success story leads with a 60% increase in awareness among Gen Z, a survey metric.

Identify Which Keywords Trigger AIOs

The first step in identifying how much of your website’s traffic is lost due to the presence of AI Overviews is seeing which of your previously high-traffic-generating keywords are now triggering AIOs to appear.

There are a couple of ways you can do this.

You can manually search some of your keywords, using a VPN to determine what the SERPs look like in your target geographies.

Or you can use your keyword tracking software – many of which provide detail on the types of SERP features that are triggered for a particular keyword.

The key is to identify a group of keywords that are of a similar topic and search interest that do and don’t trigger AI Overviews.

Cami Clark, the wife of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, has maintained a low public profile despite reportedly playing an influential role in Anthropic and serving as a strategic adviser to her husband. Though she does not work at Anthropic, Clark is often seen at major industry events and interacting with investors.

A recent Wall Street Journal report, along with emails from the Epstein files, has now brought parts of her earlier business career into focus.

 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s wife Cami Clark played a bigger role in the AI juggernaut’s meteoric rise than previously known after her own forays in entrepreneurship – which included a failed fundraising pitch to late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for a “luxury” porn startup, according to a report.

Before she met the AI guru, Clark and a friend started a “revolutionary porn company” aimed at making classy smut that was billed as “intellectually promiscuous,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The company, called Eddice, reportedly had a website that featured content with titles like “Lady Porn Day” and “Orgasm, Inc.”

• We use a method of watermarking that does not have any practical impact on the quality or content of Claude’s outputs;
• The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers;
• Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters;
• Watermarking doesn’t require extra tokens, and will not be more expensive;
• Watermarking carries no identifying information and can’t be traced to a specific person, organization, or chat;
• Watermarking won’t be specific to Claude. As of August 2, the EU requires AI providers serving its market to mark AI-generated content. Other major model developers have signed the same Code of Practice and will be implementing their own watermarks.

What's inside:

🔍 How to actually FIND your Knowledge Panel
✅ How to validate and claim ownership
🤖 How to build your Schema using AI
🔄 How to update it
✏️ How to get it edited
📋 How to paste it into your page
📊 How to confirm GSC has recognized it

I see a lot of gatekeeping around the knowledge graph and knowledge panels, as well as people "fishing for work" showing how they created it using profile sites....

I watched a few YT videos and saw that nobody was covering how to do it - either jsut showing them or editing them or talking about them.

I think there's a lot of mystery and a lot of myths - like "Google trusts" authors with a schema or an entity but its far from the case.

Anyway - its not that hard - its mid-level SEO stuff - Just wanted to gauge if folks in the community wanted to learn more.